The fee is $20. Please place your skates
with soft guards in a pillow case with your last name and cell phone written on the outside.

NSC will send e-mails with more details and confirmations.

So where
can I take my skates to be sharpened reliably? Nantucket Skating Club provides
monthly skate sharpening (if timing and volunteers make it work) at Moon Skate Shop at the Charles Moore Arena in Orleans,
MA. It is recommended that once
a skater has begun Moves in the Field / Freeskate Level 1 they make sure whoever is doing the sharpening has experience with
figure skate blades! Moon Skate
Shop is the only place on the Cape and Islands that NSC would recommend for figure skate sharpening.

How frequently should skates
be sharpened? Typical skate sharpening frequency ranges from every 10 hours, for a daily
skater, to every two months for a once-a-week skater. In general, skates need sharpening about every 10-15 hours
of skating of skating as long as care is taken to avoid damage from stepping on metal, concrete or any other hard or abrasive
material. Pond ice may contain dirt and stones. One accidental step on concrete will probably ruin the
last sharpening. Hard guards and soakers can be used to protect the blades while walking to and from the ice and
when the skates are carried in a bag. Always dry off the blades after skating to prevent rusting and make sure
the hard guards are also dry if they are going back on the blades. Skates need sharpening when they start to slide
sideways too easily. An experienced skater can often tell when the skates are getting dull but beginners can't, so look for
feet skidding sideways when pushing or doing crossovers.

Can I
tell if my skates have been sharpened correctly by looking at the blades? You can compare
the radius of the hollow with the edge of a penny. If the penny fits exactly, the radius is 3/8". If
it can roll back and forth a bit, the radius is greater than 3/8". If it touches at both sides but doesn't
reach the bottom, it is less than 3/8" and a beginner will have a lot of trouble stopping. You can also check
the levelness by balancing a pen or pencil across the blade. If the pen slopes toward either side, the edges are
not level. Two other easy things to check are to make sure the bottom of the blade curves smoothly from front to
back with no sub-curves and that the bottom toe pick hasn't been ground off. Both of these problems will make the
blade virtually useless for edges, spins and jumps.

What do I need
to know about getting skates sharpened? The first thing to find out is where. The right place might be the rink, a skate shop or a sharpening specialist. The
simplest approach is to ask several more advanced skaters where they go. At a minimum you should make sure that
you can get a correct hollow radius and level edges. If the sharpener doesn't know what a hollow radius is or have
a square to check the levelness of the edges after sharpening, it might be better to go some place else. The grinding
stone is dressed to a circular shape to make a hollow along the bottom of the blade. The hollow radius usually
ranges from 3/8" (deeper) to 3/4" (shallower). Beginners usually prefer a 5/8 or 3/4" hollow. Advanced
skaters usually use a 3/8 to 1/2" hollow.

The best skates absolutely require an expert to sharpen them! In figure skating, by the time you have reached a certain level of
accomplishment, perhaps Freestyle 1, you will most likely be skating on a better quality skate than the ones you learned on. It
is critical that you only take these skates to a figure skating sharpening specialist in order to take best advantage of the
high tech design of your blades, and also, so you don't ruin them. Higher tech blades are designed to be of a specific
elliptical shape along the blade, and are built with a very hard tempered steel bottom - the spot that gets sharpened. If
they are sharpened without regard to shape integrity and are ground down too far, you can ruin the design, and also grind
the blade to a fraction of its life expectancy. And the blades are not inexpensive. A typical figure
skate sharpen should cost around 20 dollars. Well worth the cost for the performance it gives you and the life it will
add to your blades.